Virgin Galactic released its newest SpaceShipTwo vessel, the VSS Unity (christened by Stephen Hawking) at the company’s test hangar based in the Mojave dessert reported by PC Magazine. The vehicle is updated from Virgin’s The Spaceship Company, already spearheading commercial space tourism. “Together, we can make space accessible in a way that has only been dreamt of before now, and by doing so can bring positive change to life on Earth,” Virgin Group founder Richard Branson said in a statement.
The newest iteration is designed to carry two pilots and up to six passengers modeled on its younger, X-Prize award-winning sibling, SpaceShipOne fashioned by Burt Rutan. Unity is currently under test flights in California and New Mexico, but Virgin hasn’t announced when commercial flights will commence. Passengers will be catapulted into space 3.5 times the speed of sound and experience the silence and weightlessness of space as well as views of earth.
Stephen Hawking even intimated that “I would be very proud to fly on this spaceship. Space exploration has already been a great unifier—we seem able to cooperate between nations in space in a way we can only envy on Earth,” he said. Yet Virgin hasn’t intimated when the spacecraft would be completed. But Virgin’s other two spacecraft include the WhiteKnightTwo for human space travel and VMS Eve, the 747-400 Cosmic Girl for the LauncherOne small satellite launch service.
“Outer space is the province of all humanity, and we think it is about time that all of humanity has a chance to explore it: not just pilots but also painters, not just engineers but also everyday explorers,” Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides said. Other entrepreneurs including Tesla’s Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have their space darlings, SpaceX and Blue Origin. respectively.